13 Years, $1 Trillion Plus Spent, Obama Declares Afghan War a Success

13 years and, by a very conservative reckoning, $1 trillion later, the US is transitioning to a different phase of the Afghan occupation in January. President Obama insists it was all worth it.

Speaking at a Marine Corps base, Obama declared that the occupation had made the world “safer” and that Afghanistan “is not going to be the source of terrorist attacks again.”

The comments must draw immediate comparisons to President Bush’s ill-conceived “mission accomplished” statement, as the US is far from ending the Afghan war, and indeed is planning to escalate activities in 2015 beyond what had previously been announced.

Obama went on to brag that Afghanistan “has a chance to rebuild its own country” because of the occupation, though many billions of dollars thrown at “reconstruction” schemes by the administration have been wasted, with Afghanistan regularly showing up on the list of most dysfunctional and corrupt nations on earth.

Same old story, Empire USA invades a country, immediately it becomes a rich man’s paradise and while were busy bombing the people into submission, the richest of the rich win their fake elections and by a fake democracy does everything become corruption as usual.

And the militarized police state that we deploy against the black laboring-class at home, the exact same thing do we deploy against the laboring-class of all the nations we have ever occupied. Even Palestine with rich man Abbas and his rich man’s democracy — the same old thing.

And while corporate owned media brainwashes the public into thinking that drug lords and warlords make the situation impossible, the educated upper half of society hoards all the wealth and so love to laugh all the way to the bank.

So, do we want to always live in a two-state society, with the lower half always impoverished and a militarized police always eager to provoke violence?

Ignoring the reality of a tragic waste of lives, money, prestige and goodwill, does not make Afghanistan a victory, unless it's for spreading smack around Europe and Central Asia. If the goal was to erase the Taliban progress of eliminating the poppy crop, then mission well accomplished.
By any rational, legal measurement for success, this war was a fantastic failure. Call me selfish, but $1 trillion dollars could have been better spent at home in many other ways.

It's revisionist history and propaganda. Read the following article. The war was not and is not a success, our troops are still getting bombed by the Taliban because as the troops are heading home the Taliban want to show that they are driving the troops out – air strikes against our troops are continuing http://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/year-….